Diversifying Academia 2026
2026 EAHR Researcher: Emitees Tajdari
Iranian Visual Culture and Cultural Memory, 1500–1925: Archives, Rituals, and the Politics of Visibility
By Emitees Tajdari
Throughout my undergraduate experience, I consistently examined the politics of visibility, analyzing who is depicted, under whose authority, and how these representational choices reflect broader structures of institutional power. My tenure in this residency allowed me to deepen this inquiry into cultural persistence across Iranian visual traditions, tracing transformations from the Safavid and Qajar eras into contemporary practices. Navigating Concordia's holdings alongside resources from the University of Toronto and my personal library, I grounded this project in two intersecting frameworks: historiographical memory institutions and communal, oral rituals. Rather than viewing them as antithetical, I treat these sites as complementary paradigms. As scholars such as Khosronejad, Scheiwiller, and Marzolph demonstrate, the official archive frequently privileges a staged, curated narrative dictated by those in power. Conversely, as explored in the research of Assemi and Rahimi, ritual performance sustains an embodied continuity beyond the institutional gaze. This bibliography is structured precisely to read these dual registers alongside one another, recognizing that neither constitutes an absolute historical record.
Building upon my prior research, my primary objective for this year’s Ethnocultural Art Histories Research (EAHR) Library Residency is to foreground Iranian media, visual artifacts, and histories that have been historically marginalized within Eurocentric art-historical canons and methodologies. Rigorous scholarship on Iranian visual culture is frequently constrained by systemic impediments, including institutional archival disparities, restricted access to primary documentation, and the limited availability of specialized art-historical literature.[1] While Concordia’s holdings comprise a substantial interdisciplinary repository spanning gender studies, history, and the social sciences, the collection exhibits notable gaps in specialized resources required for rigorous art-historical analysis of modern and contemporary Iranian art.
I reached this conclusion through the residency itself, which allowed me to critically examine the Library’s holdings, discern the institution’s selective collection patterns, and identify systemic omissions. Within the Library’s art-historical repository, Western artistic traditions are represented with comprehensive depth, with specialized monographs, granular artist studies, and an extensive body of secondary scholarship. Middle Eastern visual material, by contrast, is predominantly subsumed under the expansive classification of Islamic art—a grouping present within the collection yet frequently devoid of regional or historical specificity. In practice, navigating these institutional parameters required directly analyzing primary visual artifacts or relying on historical and sociological frameworks to bridge analytical lacunae. Abbas Amanat’s historiographical work, for instance, proved foundational to my research on Qajar Iran; nevertheless, as a historian, his methodology engages only tangentially with visual culture. Consequently, this archival disparity directly informed the scope and methodology of this bibliography, transforming the institutional collection into a primary subject of inquiry regarding the politics of visibility. Ultimately, the residency enabled a deliberate intervention against these institutional omissions, establishing this bibliography as a pedagogical foundation for future scholarship in this area.
In consulting, analyzing, and synthesizing the sources selected for this bibliography, I returned to the core inquiry of this project: who attains visibility within the Iranian visual record, which authoritative structures govern that representation, and what historical nuance is lost when institutions—from the Qajar court to the modern academic library—curate what remains preserved? This question appropriately remains unresolved at the conclusion of this study. Rather than offering a definitive resolution, these compiled sources reorient the trajectory of scholarly investigation. Reliance on official archival repositories presents the Qajar visual landscape as a curated narrative constructed by elite mechanisms: courtly artisans, aristocratic patrons, and the Orientalist gaze. Conversely, when interrogated through performance and ritual studies, this era reveals an ephemeral continuity wherein cultural memory persists through somatic practices and oral traditions that evade the commissioned lens. Both empirical records remain fundamentally fragmentary. Pedram Khosronejad’s documentation of enslaved women in the court of Naser al-Din Shah exemplifies this methodological tension: while these photographic records represent virtually their sole surviving historical trace, they were produced and archived by the sovereign structure that enacted their subjugation. Methodologically engaging with such visual artifacts necessitates confronting our reliance on the instruments of their dispossession. This structural contradiction constitutes the critical terrain this bibliography inhabits; articulating this conceptual complexity serves as a far more rigorous academic contribution than forcing a reductive narrative closure.
[1] For further scholarship, please consult Natalia Pashkeeva, “Building Ignorance by Disseminating ‘Evidence’: An Agnotological Look into the Digital Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Archival Science 24 (2024): 455-79. For primary legal sources on copyright laws and limits of access you can consult “Law on the Punishment for the Publication and Disclosure of Confidential and Classified Government Documents.” Rc.majlis.ir. https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/97196. And “Law on the Publication and Free Access to Information.” Rc.majlis.ir. https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/780303. Access to the Rc.majlis.ir website, the official portal of the Islamic Consultative Assembly of Iran, may be restricted or limited for some users depending on region or IP address; this itself is illustrative of the broader questions of access and representation this essay addresses.
Annotated bibliography
Assemi, Nahid Massoumeh. Piety and Politics in Qajar Iran: The Takkiyya Mu‘avin al-Mulk in Kermanshah. British Institute of Persian Studies. Tauris, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9780755652679.
Assemi's monograph offers a sustained architectural and art-historical study of the Takkiyya Muʿavin al-Mulk, a religious complex in Kermanshah, in Western Iran, built between 1912 and the early 1920s by Hasan Khan Muʿini (Muʿavin al-Mulk) for the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn ibn ʿAli, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad and third Shia Imam. Structured across an introduction and six chapters, the book situates this building within the broader Qajar-era phenomenon of privately commissioned takkiyyas—spaces developed by social elites to stage the Muharram rituals of taʿziyya and rauza khwani as a means of securing public loyalty and political legitimacy. Assemi argues that architecture functioned as the most socially visible instrument of this legitimation project of the Qajar monarchy, and that Takkiyya Muʿavin al-Mulk’s decorative program, rendered largely in glazed tilework, can be read as a deliberate visual and spatial choreography designed to shape the ritual experience of its patron's political and religious authority.
The book's central methodological contribution lies in its treatment of architecture, decoration, and ritual as inseparable: each of the complex's three spaces (the Husayniyya, Zaynabiyya, and ʿAbbasiyya) receives close visual analysis of its narrative tile iconography, read against the specific commemorative function each space performed. Notably, the final space, the ʿAbbasiyya, breaks from explicitly religious content to incorporate imagery of Iran's mythical and historical kings, entangling the building's decorative scheme with the political discourses of nationalism and kingship circulating in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution and the First World War.
Of particular value to this bibliography is Assemi's historiographic framing. "Assemi is explicit that earlier scholarship treated the Takkiyya's tile panels in isolation, "like a page torn from a manuscript," rather than as part of an integrated architectural and ritual whole — a critique that models exactly the kind of self-aware historiographic positioning valuable to a bibliography organized around Safavid-through-Qajar visual culture. She further synthesizes a wide scholarly network relevant to Qajar art and architecture more broadly, including Robert Hillenbrand and Markus Ritter on religious architecture, Sussan Babaie on Qajar palatine appropriation of Safavid ceremonial forms, Layla Diba on the history of Persian wall painting, and Talinn Grigor on the entanglement of late Qajar architecture with European art-historical debates about Iranian "Aryan" identity — the latter a particularly sharp instance of historiography itself becoming implicated in nationalist ideology.
Bier, Carol, ed. Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart: Textile Arts of Safavid and Qajar Iran, 16th-19th Centuries. Textile Museum, 1987.
Published by the Textile Museum in 1987, Carol Bier's edited volume appeared at a moment when the place of material and decorative arts within art-historical discourse was still actively contested, and it bears the marks of that debate: throughout, the book works to position textile arts within the hierarchy of the fine arts. Bringing together specialists in art history, economic history, and material culture, the volume argues across its nine chapters that woven artifacts, namely carpets, silks, velvets, and other textiles, function as primary historical sources through which social, political, economic, and religious developments can be traced, rather than solely as objects of technical or decorative study. Contributors address sericulture and the silk trade under Shah Abbas; the economics of fibre and factory production; court carpets; rural weaving; and the role of textiles in Persian poetry and visual culture. Today, the book's insistence on the fine-art status of textiles appears to be a product of its moment, a framing that has largely receded in current scholarship. Nevertheless, the richly illustrated volume remains a foundational reference on patronage, trade, and the visual conventions of Iranian woven arts, and its scope aligns directly with this bibliography's focus on Safavid and Qajar visual culture.
Graves, Margaret S., Benoît Junod, and Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi. Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum: Arts of the Book & Calligraphy. Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2010.
Compiled as the catalogue for a 2010–11 exhibition in Istanbul, this volume documents roughly 160 objects from the founding collection of the Aga Khan Museum (AKM), in Toronto, drawn primarily from the private holdings of Prince Sadruddin and Prince Amyn Aga Khan alongside later acquisitions by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Graves, then a postdoctoral fellow at the British Institute of Persian Studies, wrote the majority of the catalogue entries; Moya Carey, curator for Iranian arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, contributed the introductory texts for each thematic section, while earlier entries carried over from previous exhibitions were authored by a wider roster of scholars and curators, including Sheila Canby, David Roxburgh, and Ladan Akbarnia. The catalogue is organized both thematically and by medium rather than chronologically, with entries spanning from the seventh century to the nineteenth century, including Kufic Qur'an folios through Fatimid, Mamluk, Ilkhanid, Timurid, Safavid, Ottoman, Mughal, and Qajar material.
Particularly useful is catalogue no. 104, an astrolabe signed by the Qajar Isfahan craftsman Hajji ʻAli and dated 1797–98, which Graves identifies as being a part of a documented early Qajar revival of astrolabe-making after the form had largely waned across Europe and the Islamic world from the mid-seventeenth century onward. Also notable is the curated pairing of objects on the catalogue itself. For example, catalogue no. 74, a Qajar botanical painting dated 1853, alongside catalogue no. 157, a Mughal botanical study from the 1640s that the entry identifies as a direct stylistic source — a rare instance in the catalogue of an explicit line of visual transmission being traced across dynastic and geographic boundaries rather than treated as coincidental resemblance.
Although the objects featured in the catalogue span outside this bibliography's 1500–1925 scope, their inclusion here is justified by the objects in the AKM collection that originate from the Safavid, Ottoman, and Qajar periods that sit comfortably within scope, a concentration traceable to the specific collecting habits of patron Prince Amyn, who is noted in the volume's own introductory essay as having assembled "a select and choice collection of Ottoman and Qajar art works." Because entries are compressed into brief object labels rather than sustained arguments, the catalogue functions here as a source of well-provenanced primary material (inventory numbers, prior exhibition history, precise dating) rather than as an interpretive text in its own right.
Hillenbrand, Robert, A.C.S. Peacock, and Firuza Abdullaeva, eds. Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia. I.B. Tauris, 2013.
This edited volume brings together a wide range of essays spanning the ancient Persianate world through to the Qajar period. The material is organized in three broad sections: “Studies on History and Historiography”, “Studies on Persian Literature”, and “Persian and Islamic Art”. The chronological logic and categorical range of the material extend well beyond the confines of traditional art history and invite an interdisciplinary study that incorporates discourse from the fields of literary studies, political histories, and historiographies.
The book’s final section offers a valuable resource for critical inquiry in modern Iranian material culture (from the 1500s to the 1920s). Several essays engage directly with how Iranian history has been constructed, transmitted, and interpreted over time; in doing so, these essays contest the idea of historical narratives as a singular, unbiased trajectory. Rather than arguing this outright, they demonstrate it by making the writing of history their subject, showing how court chroniclers and British scholars authored the narratives later treated as fact. Instead of presenting Iranian history and its visual record as a settled fact, the volume questions the models of resources, authorship and narrative construction.
The volume’s significance to Safavid-and-later periods lies in a cluster of essays that addresses Safavid historiography and court culture (including Sholeh A. Quinn's examination of Safavid and Mughal chronicle-writing and Rudi Matthee's study of Shah 'Abbas I's consolidation of regional control), Safavid literary and artistic production (Gabrielle van den Berg on Safavid-era epic poetry; Sheila R. Canby on the illumination of Shah Tahmasp's Shahnameh; Layla S. Diba on sixteenth-century pictorial lacquer bookbinding; Sussan Babaie on Safavid ceramics), the transitional Zand Period (Olga V. Vasilyeva and Olga M. Yastrebova on a Zand-era album) and the Qajar-era Iran, as seen through a British lens (Ali M. Ansari on Sir John Malcolm; Jan Just Witkam on Edward Granville Browne)
Khosronejad, Pedram. Qajar African Nannies: African Slaves and Aristocratic Babies. Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies Program IPGS at Oklahoma State University, 2017.
In this book, Khosronejad, an anthropologist and adjunct professor at Western Sydney University, assembles a comparative collection of photographs to examine how the medium of photography complicates contemporary assumptions about photographic objectivity. The images depict African slaves of the Qajar period, an area of study that remains a less commonly explored subject in Iranian studies and art history. Rather than offering extended analytical essays, the book functions primarily as a visual archive: each photograph is accompanied by whatever didactic information could be traced—typically the photographer's name, year, and other identifying details—with the photographer most often identified as Iranian royalty, namely Nasir al-Din Shah (1831-1896), or members of the court.
This visual record carries broader significance beyond the individual images themselves. It situates Qajar Iran within a specific geopolitical moment: a period in which neighbouring regions were undergoing formal colonization, and Qajar Persia, while not formally colonized, was nonetheless entangled in political and economic relationships with Western powers, which includes Britain and Russia. These photographs suggest that Qajar elites reproduced the visual and social mannerisms of Western colonizers even as Iran itself occupied an ambiguous position outside formal colonial rule. Despite this significance, the history of slavery in Iran remains inconsistently and incompletely addressed within Iranian studies. Notable exceptions include Behnaz A. Mirzai's A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, which offers a foundational account of the African slave trade to Iran, the legislative suppression of that trade, and eventual emancipation.[1] Beeta Baghoolizadeh's The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran is another example in Iranian studies which examines the entanglement of Blackness and enslavement in nineteenth-century Iran alongside the modern national amnesia that has erased this history.[2]
The photographs in Khosronejad's collection were, as he outlines, taken predominantly by Iranian royalty or courtiers rather than by the enslaved subjects themselves or independent documentarians. The result is a visual dichotomy of portraits in which the subjects are captured against a staged, affluent backdrop to a violent history. The power dynamic between photographer and subject is markedly unequal: the enslaved individuals depicted had no control over their own representation, while the images functioned to project a curated image of aristocratic domesticity rather than to document the conditions of enslavement itself. This tension is central to the book's value and its limitation. The photographs stand as rare visual evidence of enslaved Africans' presence in Qajar Iran, a presence largely absent from the visual record elsewhere. Yet, that same visual record is inseparable from the perspective of those who commissioned it, meaning the images document not the interiority or agency of the enslaved subjects, but the self-image their enslavers wished to project.
Khosronejad, Pedram, ed. Unveiling the Veiled: Royal Consorts, Slaves and Prostitutes in Qajar Photographs. Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies Program (IPGS), Oklahoma State University, 2018.
This book accompanied a special exhibit and panel discussion held at the Mosher Alumni House, McCune Library, UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), on October 20, 2018, as part of the UCSB conference on Slavery and Sexual Labour in the Middle East and North Africa. Co-sponsored by the Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB, the Middle East Studies Program, Santa Barbara City College, and the International Qajar Studies Association, the exhibition brought together photographs of Naser al-Din Shah's (1831–1896) royal consorts, the African female slaves (kaniz) who served within the royal harem, and women believed to be prostitutes of the Naseri period (1848–1896). Photo selection and editing were overseen by Khosronejad, with the pamphlet published through the Dr. Ali Fazel Visual Archive, Media Collection and Digital Resources at IPGS, Oklahoma State University.
Similar to Khosronejad's related work, Qajar African Nannies, Unveiling the Veiled’s value is inseparable from its central limitation: Its photographs are rare visual evidence of women (enslaved, concubines, and those criminalized) who are otherwise almost absent from the historical record, yet the images were staged, commissioned, and later curated by men who held power over them.
Whether the women photographed held any authorship over their own representation remains open to scholarly debate; what is less contestable is the underlying power imbalance structuring the encounter itself—a male photographer, working within a courtly context that treated women largely as objects of desire, producing images that cannot be separated from that gaze. This continuity extends into the images' later public exhibition. The act of display, like the act of photographing, remains an exercise of power over subjects who did not choose to be seen. A related article co-authored by Khosronejad and Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar documents this same exhibition in fuller scholarly form;[3] where the article offers sustained academic analysis, this pamphlet functions closer to a primary source, preserving the exhibition's original curatorial framing and conference context.
Marzolph, Ulrich, and Roxana Zenhari. Mirzā ʻAli-Qoli Khoʼi: The Master Illustrator of Persian Lithographed Books in the Qajar Period. Brill, 2022.
In this two-volume series, Marzolph (a cultural studies professor) and Zenhari (a historian of Islamic art and visual culture) present a comprehensive corpus of the work of Mirzā ʿAli-Qoli Khoʾi (b. Khoy, ca. 1230/1815; d. Tehran, ca. 1272/1856), a prolific lithograph illustrator active during the Muhammadi (1834–1848) era and Nasseri era (1848–1896). Both volumes offer in-depth insight into the interwoven relationship between an emerging imported technology — lithographic printing— and its adaptation to Iranian visual codes. The resulting corpus of over 2,000 illustrations allows for the development of subject categories, including but not limited to: sacred Shiʿi scenes, profane scenes of daily life, Iranian mythology, astrological and celestial imagery, erotic scenes, and depictions of torture and punishment. Volume 2, the reproduction volume, organizes the illustrations chronologically according to the roughly sixty-eight texts they accompany, dated by Hijri year and listed by Persian title (e.g., Bakhtiyār-nāme, 1263; Khamse-ye Neẓāmi, 1264–1270; Shāhnāme-ye Ferdowsi, 1265–1267). Rather than preserving the original size or scale of each litho, images are arranged pragmatically, typically four large or six small reproductions per page.
The book's significance lies partly in the gap it addresses: scholarship on early print culture has historically centered on a Eurocentric canon — Dürer, the Reformation-era press, and similar touchstones — that treats print technology's cultural impact as a largely Western phenomenon, sidelining its adoption and transformation in regions outside colonial print networks. As a study of Qajar-era lithography, this volume resists that framing by treating Persian lithographic illustration as a serious object of art historical inquiry, rather than a peripheral offshoot of a Western print tradition. That said, in the context of analyzing Volume 2, there is a notable limitation; since the reproductions are not printed to scale and dimensional data, the physical size of each litho, and by extension, clues about its intended audience or context of use (e.g., whether a piece was meant for intimate handling versus larger circulation) — is not recoverable from this volume on its own.
Rahimi, Babak. Senses of Mourning: Moharram Performances in Shiʿi Iran from the Qajar to the Covid Era. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.24963765.
Rahimi, a professor of communication and religious Studies at UC San Diego, traces the sensory history of Moharram mourning rituals in Iran from their consolidation as a widespread communal practice under the Qajars through to pandemic-era digital commemoration in 2020. His central argument is that Shiʿi mourning is constituted through a "sensory religion;" meaning it is an interplay of audible, tactile, and spatial experience, rather than through doctrine or visual spectacle alone. Grounded substantially in fieldwork at Hosayniyyeh Sadat Akhavi in Tehran, Iran, Rahimi grounds this spatial argument in a Heideggerian reading of dwelling and a haptic register drawn from a hosayniyyeh custodian's own words, "these bricks speak," arguing that built environments carry an affective, transhistorical presence independent of visual representation.
The book draws on interdisciplinary fields of study and methods including sensory studies, namely the scholarship of David Howes,Karen Ruffle, Hirschkind's proposal of ethical listening practices in the context of Egyptian sermon audiences and Durkheimian and Rappaportian reading of ritual as generative of a "hierarchy of understandings". The chapters proceed chronologically by case: a Qajar-era taʿziyeh performance, the street processions of 1978, tent-burning rituals in Bushehr in 2007, and votive Moharram practice conducted online during the 2020 pandemic.
On its face, the book's chronological range sits outside this bibliography's 1500–1925 scope. Its inclusion here is justified by origin rather than endpoint: Rahimi locates the consolidation of Moharram as a collective sensory practice specifically in the Qajar period, treating sound, touch, and architectural space as technologies of commemoration and collectivism with a documentable point of historical formation. Read this way, the book's later chapters function less as contemporary case studies in their own right than as evidence of continuity of the sensory apparatus formed under the Qajars persisted and adapted rather than terminating at the dynasty's end. Sensory religious practice, in this framing, is itself a form of interdisciplinary artistic production in which architecture, sound, and embodied practice converge into a collective emotional response.
Scheiwiller, Staci Gem. Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography: Desirous Bodies. Routledge, 2017.
Professor of Modern Art History in the Art Department at California State University, Scheiwiller’s book examines how desire, as it relates to gender and sexuality, is situated within Qajar-era photography (1830-1925). It asks how photographs effectively contain and communicate desire to both their original and contemporary audiences, given the temporal gap between the viewer and the photographer. From this point, she examines the dual positionality of gender expression in Qajar-era photography, namely, that it can both perpetuate preexisting gender norms and participate in new ones. Utilizing Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards [4] as an interlocutor, she posits that contemporaneous Qajar-era visual codes were wholly legible to their original audience, even if they are lost to us now, and emphasizes the role of photography itself—alongside European contact and cultural exchange—in shaping these visual codes. Her conclusions are drawn from two frameworks: first, the idea of liminality in dialogue with two anthropologists: Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep. The second is the concept of ocularcentrism in conversation with American historian Martin Jay’s book Downcast Eyes (1993) where these frameworks are explored in relation to Jay in the original text.[5] Using these frameworks, she organizes different locations of desire throughout the chapters: harem albums, erotica culture, masculinity, and enslaved bodies.
Scheiwiller does not prescribe a singular, homogenized reading of Qajar photography; she remains attentive to ethnic, regional and religious diversities of the period (Kurdish, Armenian, Persian subjects) that occupy various gendered and visual registers. The result creates space for plural ocularcentrism instead of a monolithic “Qajar gaze”. Her framing also pivots away from older Orientalist tendencies that read the “East” as an exotic object. Instead, she treats desire as shared among the sitter, the photographer, and the viewer, rather than imposed by a single gaze, which is why these photographs can both reinforce existing gender norms and make room for new ones. Her engagement with the question of an “Indigenous” Iranian photographic practice is also a useful thread when thinking about themes of continuity and rupture in visual culture.
Tanavoli, Parviz, ed. European Women in Persian Houses: Western Images in Safavid and Qajar Iran. I.B.Tauris, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350986299.
Parviz Tanavoli, a contemporary Iranian-Canadian artist and prolific scholar of Iranian material culture, edited this volume as a historiographical intervention that inverts the conventional directionality of cross-cultural exchange. Where Orientalism charts Western projections onto the East, Tanavoli turns the lens back on itself. His central question is how Iranians, from the Safavid period onward, developed their own Occidentalist (opposing Orientalism) visual vocabulary through depictions of the Farangi woman—the European female figure as an exotic other. The book proceeds chronologically across three parts, moving from Safavid court painting and the introduction of European artistic conventions by travelling artists, through the Qajar-era mass dissemination of lithographed prints, postcards, and imported illustrated newspapers, to the incorporation of Farangi imagery into rugs, textiles, and tiles by the early twentieth century.
Tanavoli argues that the figure of the European woman was not a passive import but an actively transformed visual code, reshaped by Iranian aesthetic conventions, which was framed in mirror mosaics, woven into carpets, and circulated in the Isfahan bazaar. The volume is richly illustrated with plates drawn from manuscripts, frescoes, photographs, and textile works. For the purposes of this collection, it is particularly relevant for its treatment of lithography as a medium of mass visual culture and its documentation of how European print imagery penetrated and was domesticated within Iranian artistic production during the Qajar period.
[1] Behnaz A. Mirzaei, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800-1929. (University of Texas Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.7560/311752.
[2] Beeta Baghoolizadeh, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11895559.7.
[3] Pedram Khosronejad, “Unveiling the Veiled: Royal Consorts, Slaves and Prostitutes in Qajar Photographs,” Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, no. 1–2 (2021), https://acmejournal.org/index.php/ACME/article/view/165.
[4] Afsaneah Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005).
[5] Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: (University of California Press, 1993).
Bio
Emitees Tajdari (she/her) recently graduated with distinction from Concordia University with a BFA in Art History, where her research focused on visual culture, historiography, and the politics of representation. Her work examines how art mediates identity, power, and colonial legacies, with particular attention to the impact of Orientalism on visual representation and the reclaiming of marginalized narratives.
Supervising Librarian: John Latour